FTFY. Trans women are women.
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And Trans men are men.
It’s not that hard.
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Focusing on a binary between “choice” and “not choice” is rooted in weakly-defined Western Enlightenment (neo)liberal notions of individuality and free will that don’t map well onto most contemporary understandings of identity, and present major problems. (And Western individualism is tied to cultural frameworks that have historically oppressed tons of marginalized folks, so we should be careful about them).
Since people aren’t actually completely autonomous agents of their own will, the line between choice and non-choice is not clear - identities are fluid, performative, contextual, embodied, and constantly renegotiated. Do people ‘choose’ their religion? Usually not, but it’s definitely not genetic either. And that useless distinction doesn’t actually address the question “Is it okay to be an asshole to someone because they are Muslim/Jewish/Buddhist/etc.?” - the answer should be NO, regardless of whether that facet of identity is a “choice” or not.
If a nonbinary AMAB person chooses to present as femme one day, and a trans woman performs her lifelong and deeply felt identity by presenting as femme one day, I don’t think either of them should be met with mockery or violence.
A more useful metric for me than “is it a choice or a ‘real’ part of an identity” is “does it perpetuate harm - particularly does it perpetuate systemic harm against already vulnerable people?” Trans folks don’t materially harm anyone - certainly not any marginalized folks - by having their identity affirmed. TERFs absolutely cause harm to vulnerable folks with their words and actions. So, TERFs can fuck right off.
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I was 100% born trans. My mom says I was acting my true gender when I was two years old and didn’t even know what gender was. My earliest memories of any feeling were of feeling the wrong gender at age 4. Watering down any notion that choice was involved only hurts people like me. I have a lot of trans and queer friends, and not one of them calls their identity a choice.
I’m sorry our lived experience is “an ideological argument that doesn’t hold water for you”. 
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Especially that part.
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Except that all legal protections are based entirely on the class being immutable and unchosen. If you want any hope of gaining any legal protection against discrimination, you sure as heck better not pretend it’s a choice.
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Phrased this way I think I might agree with you, at least about TER motivation. But they are wrong; trans women are women, trans men are men, and everyone deserves human rights and equality.
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Religion enjoys protections that you and I do not, and it is inarguably discretionary. Fighting for rights on the basis of immutability is a strategy the LBGTQ+ community has chosen.
Back in the 90’s when I was coming out, and the legal and cultural landscape was much different, this was less settled. Couching our rights in the idea instead that we absolutely have autonomy and self determination about who we are and what we do is ultimately, I think, a broader, more progressive, and more unassailable approach.
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I legitimately do not understand how you can acknowledge that your sexual orientation was not a choice, yet reject the idea that other people’s gender identity was not a choice.
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Because it is not what I was intending to say. It was an epic misstatement on my part.
Rather than continue to derail the conversation I’ve gone back and removed myself from it.
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maybe that’s based on the idea that your god will smite you.
I think religion is a poor analogy to civil rights battles, because the entire history of this country is devoted to giving religion special protections and privileges. No other group has ever even come close to gaining the protection that religion gets. Aiming for that is not picking a fight we can win.
Furthermore, we don’t need to win that fight. If you and me are protected for being born this way, then anyone choosing these things is also protected.
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That’s a fucking terrible well trodden path we are already stuck on and have been fighting over for far too long already.
Who gets to choose the options we are allowed to choose from?
Rhetorical question, seeing as the answer will always exclude people until we finally accept that there are no binary differences between us.
Equal rights for everyone, no matter what.
The only choices in life are how we act. Nothing else matters.
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I listened to this the other day. I think she did a great job of covering the all the bases. I liked the included history, not all of it I was aware of. When taken with out that context, some of JK’s comments seem more innocuous. But taken with the context, it is rather damning.
I also like how Natalie at least tries to acknowledge and empathize where some of this is coming from, while excusing none of it.
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Non of it is excusable, ever. Thank you for that, it was much needed in the thread.
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At about 27:30, she starts to talk about why she’s not a fan of that slogan.three minutes into it we hear her preferred alternative - Trans Liberation Now - which maybe isn’t as snappy, but the objection makes a lot of sense to me.
Gender needs to stop being a mechanism for coersion. The way she frames it, clarifies who is being coerced and who is doing the coercing.
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If by “cool” you mean, “likely to get the approval of your peers” then sure, yeah, hate nazis if you must.
I think the country would be a lot safer if the thing to fight agaisnt was fascism in general, and not specifically national socialists with swastikas.
And if the opposition could happen without hatred, I think it would be much more effective.
Basically I’m against hate, no matter who it is you’re hating on. And if I’m the one feeling the hate, I’m against that too. Hatred is such a convenient way to get kids to fight wars for rich people, it’s not something I like to even joke about.
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Cis het (kinsey scale zero) male here. I definitely did not choose. I’m pretty sure the only thing that people choose is what to pass as. If I declared myself gay or trans, I would be trying to pass as such, and I would still be cis-het inside (and it wouldn’t be pleasant).
And, of course, this is to agree with your point.
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When it comes to nazis and their odious cousins, I recommend dropping the pacifist act and actually passing a fist.
This is wildly off-topic at this point.
You need not bloody your knuckles for the cause of gender liberation; achieving equality for trans folks requires not physical force, but social. Tell your elected lawmakers that you support trans rights – after all, isn’t the point of a society to ensure the survival and thriving of its members? Don’t preach pacifism to the oppressed, demand the oppressors cease.
In the past five years we saw the ascent of a fascist aspirant movement across the anglosphere – aided and abetted by the complicit silence and calls to civility of the comfortable.
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I wasn’t saying it as a slogan. I was saying it in context of
Which has the unintentional implication that trans women are not women.
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